Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2011

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Ragg M.
Capsule or pill, don't swallow it whole
Weekend Australian 1999 Mar 27

Full text:

The people at Roche Vitamins, makers of pills for the masses, seem a friendly bunch. They keep journalists informed by sending us newsletters containing summaries of research about the effects of vitamin supplements. Not surprisingly, all the effects they tell us about are beneficial.

Vitamin supplements, according to Roche Vitamins, are a good thing. Each year, the company reviews its medial activities and passes on that review to keep journalists informed of what it has been up to.

The 1997 review resurfaced recently after an office clean-up. It makes fascinating reading, even if you’re left with that slightly queasy feeling you get from having to take all three kids on the big dipper, one at a time, and one of them wants to go twice.

In 1997, Roche Vitamins sponsored three speakers to visit Australia. The most interesting was Paul Lachance, professor of food and nutrition science at Rutgers University in Jew Jersey.

Ostensibly the main reason Lachance was here was to speak to a conference of general practitioners in Sydney. His topic was how good for you vitamin supplements are, which happens to coincide neatly with Roche’s interests.

Roche employed public relations company Michels Warren to assist. Part of Michels Warren’s role was to whip up media interest and arrange interviews. With the help of the PR agency, Lachance appeared on Nine Network news (Sydney evening, Melbourne evening and late-night national), Channel 10 news, the Qantas inflight news service (three times) and news services in Adelaide, regional Western Australia, Newcastle and Ballarat. If you consider ratings to be accurate, more than 7 million people saw Lachance say vitamin pills are good for you.

Lachance was interviewed on commercial and ABC radio in Sydney, Adelaide (twice) and Canberra. The audience reach there was 56,000. Articles about him appeared in The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph (Sydney), The Herald-Sun and The Sunday Herald-Sun (Melbourne), The Townsville Bulletin, the Advocate (Burnie) and the Mercury (Hobart). The audience reach for those newspapers, on those days, was 2,397,610, according to Roche.

I saw a couple of those interviews, heard a couple and read a couple. At no time did the journalist interviewing Lachance relay to the audience that he had been sponsored by Roche or that interviews had been arranged by a public relations company. Neither did I see or hear Lachance mention it. It may have happened in other interviews but, based on experience, it probably didn’t.

Lachance has a valid case that, based on circumstantial evidence, supplements of anti-oxidant vitamins might be helpful in some situations. It’s unlikely he would lie about it. It’s unlikely he would have been influenced by Roche. He sounded like someone who had done some research, knew of other research, had reached a conclusion and was prepared to argue it.

But what was it about him that made him suitable to give his opinion to, based on Roche’s figures, more than 9.5 million people? It was that he was saying things that had a commercial benefit. The media took to him because he had something vaguely interesting to say and because he was billed as a visiting international expert. Nobody bothered to point out he had been invited not purely because of him expertise but also because of the confluence of his views with Roche’s.

In the world of research involving vitamin supplements and human health there are many hundreds of people who could be invited to Australia to speak. There are people who would argue that vitamins look promising in the test tube, but the only research that really counts involves human beings. When the pills are given to humans, they’re a touch disappointing. That some are worth taking for certain conditions, but others aren’t.

There are also people around, again with reputable positions in reputable universities, who believe, based on their own research and that of others, that vitamin pills don’t do you much good at all. They are the creators of expensive urine and little else. These latter two groups of people, in general, aren’t invited to speak by manufacturers of vitamins. And why should they? It’s not in Roche’s best interest to have equivocal or hostile opinions bandied around. But the result is that Australia’s media audience is left with the impression that most doctors think daily vitamin supplements for healthy people are a good thing because that is the flow or information that washes over them.

It’s the same with other areas of health care – Roche Vitamins is not alone. Commercial interests in other fields of health present drugs as the answer to many problems, which gives a distorted picture. Roche Vitamins is no difference – it has just published this material, where others may not.

But when did you last see visiting speakers talk about exercise, or thought, or rest, or healthful eating – all things that can probably improve health? The media is full of material that is influenced by commercial desire rather than intellectual reality. We journalists should be explaining the sources of our information and providing balance against the commercial interests pushing a certain view of the world. We aren’t good at it right now.